This invention relates generally to digital content processing and particularly to detecting video highlights in sports videos in real time for mobile computing devices.
Smart handheld devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers, have become increasingly popular. The increased availability and bandwidth of network access (for wired and wireless networks) have enabled more communication platforms for digital content consumption and sharing, such as recording sports videos by sports funs using their smart phones and sharing video highlights in the sports videos with others. A video highlight of a sports video is a portion of the sports video and represents a semantically important event captured in the sports video, e.g., a short video clip capturing goals or goal attempts in a soccer game video clip.
Some conventional solutions of video highlight detection for mobile computing devices rely on user manual selection. Given the complex spatiotemporal nature of sports videos, it is timing consuming and technically challenging to efficiently locate and select video highlights from a long video clip. For example, a 90-minute long video clip of a soccer game may contain three highlights capturing the three goal events, each of which may only last for 10˜20 seconds.
Alternatively, some existing solutions allow users to upload the sports videos captured by their mobile phones to a computer server in a cloud computing environment for video highlight detection. However, solutions for server-side video highlight detection are generally not expected to provide real time instantaneous detection result to users, which degrades user experience with video highlight detection.